Commissioned by the GPO to make a film about the need to 'post early', Len Lye conceived of the British working day as having an overall rhythmic pattern like a tattoo (a mass display with music). He was influenced by Walther Ruttmann's 1927 film Berlin which presented a day in the life of that city as a 'symphony'. Lye, who shared the working-class sympathies felt by many of his GPO colleagues, described as an attempt to convey "a romanticism about the work of the everyday, in all walk/sit works of life".